Cropland Data Layer

The purpose of the Cropland Data Layer is to use satellite imagery to provide acreage estimates to the Agricultural Statistics Board for major commodities and to produce digital, crop-specific, categorized geo-referenced output products. The spatial resolution is 30 meters covering the Continental United States. However, the data was filter to just Northampton and Accomack County for this project. The years of available data for these two counties were 2021 to 2008 and 2002. The original CDL data can be found here.

Below is the data set for Northampton County in 2021. See Data Transformation tab in Methods to find out how this data was manipulated to serve the project's purposes.

C-CAP Regional Land Cover and Change

The Land Cover and Change data documents the types of features that cover the surface of the Earth. These data quantify how much of a region is covered by forest, wetlands, impervious surfaces, and agriculture- as well as these feature's locations. This data is available every 5 years for Northampton and Accomack County. These years include 1996, 2001, 2006, 2010, 2016. CCAP data is available as a simple feature object. This data was manipulated similarly to the CDL data to get the percent area of land cover in each parcels. Below is a example of the CCAP data for 2016 after manipulation and a plot of 8 different types of land cover in the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

Parcels Data

The counties of Northampton and Accomack are divided up into parcels. Parcels are very small geographies at the sub-county level. In Northampton county, there are 16,123 total parcels and in Accomack county there are 48,435 parcels. These parcels are a consistent sub-county unit of measure that will be utilized throughout the course of this project. The table below is a snapshot of the parcel data as a simple features object. This data interacts with the Regional land Cover and Change, Cropland Data Layer, and the housing data.

These two plots show the parcels boundaries within the two separate counties.

Eastern Shore of Virginia Parcel Plot

Housing Data

The Data & Analytics division of Black Knight manages the nation's leading repository of loan-level residential mortgage data and performance information. They have housing information for the Eastern Shore that includes the coordinates of the houses. This data is used as the household that the synthetic population is placed in.

American Community Survey

ACS Public Use Microdata Sample

From the ACS Public Use Microdata Survey, 3,851 unique serial number were collected from the Middle Peninsula, Northern Neck & Accomack-Northampton Planning District Commissions PUMA. This data was filtered down to age, race, household income, and tenure for each serial number and cleaned to match the terms in the ACS tables that are used to create the synthetic population. This cleaned data set is randomly sampled with replacement through the iterative proportional fitting technique to create the synthetic population and placed into households. The data frame below shows the categories as well as the frequency of times they appear.

ACS Tables

  • B19037A-G: Age of Householder by Household Income by Race
  • B25007: Tenure by Age of Householder
  • B25003A-G: Tenure by Race

These tables all come from the year 2020 and are at the census tract level. An IPF out-put was calculated from these tables from every census tract listed below. The the serial numbers from the microdata are sampled with replacement to match each cell from the IPF output to create synthetic household.

Northampton Census Tracts

  • 51-131-930100

  • 51-131-930200

  • 51-131-930302

  • 51-131-930301

  • 51-131-990100

Accomack Census Tracts

  • 51-001-090300

  • 51-001-090800

  • 51-001-990200

  • 51-001-090600

  • 51-001-990100

  • 51-001-090500

  • 51-001-090700

  • 51-001-980200

  • 51-001-980100

  • 51-001-090202

  • 51-001-090402

  • 51-001-090401

  • 51-001-090201

  • 51-001-090102

  • 51-001-090101